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The stationary heat equation is solved with periodic boundary conditions in geometrically complex composite materials with high contrast in the thermal conductivities of the individual phases. This is achieved by harmonic averaging and explicitly introducing the jumps across the material interfaces as additional variables. The continuity of the heat flux yields the needed extra equations for these variables. A Schur-complent formulation for the new variables is derived that is solved using the FFT and BiCGStab methods. The EJ-HEAT solver is given as a 3-page Matlab program in the Appendix. The C++ implementation is used for material design studies. It solves 3-dimensional problems with around 190 Mio variables on a 64-bit AMD Opteron desktop system in less than 6 GB memory and in minutes to hours, depending on the contrast and required accuracy. The approach may also be used to compute effective electric conductivities because they are governed by the stationary heat equation.

Virtual material design is the microscopic variation of materials in the computer, followed by the numerical evaluation of the effect of this variation on the material‘s macroscopic properties. The goal of this procedure is an in some sense improved material. Here, we give examples regarding the dependence of the effective elastic moduli of a composite material on the geometry of the shape of an inclusion. A new approach on how to solve such interface problems avoids mesh generation and gives second order accurate results even in the vicinity of the interface. The Explicit Jump Immersed Interface Method is a finite difference method for elliptic partial differential equations that works on an equidistant Cartesian grid in spite of non-grid aligned discontinuities in equation parameters and solution. Near discontinuities, the standard finite difference approximations are modified by adding correction terms that involve jumps in the function and its derivatives. This work derives the correction terms for two dimensional linear elasticity with piecewise constant coefficients, i.� e. for composite materials. It demonstrates numerically convergence and approximation properties of the method.